Tag Archives: Morgan Spurlock

What is Brand You? In Morgan Spurlock's TED talk (above), there's one segment in which he goes around and asks people what their brand is. They primarily define their brands by their clothing and hair styles. He also asks the folks who market Ban deodorant how they describe their brand – and they couldn't, mostly because you put their product in your armpits to keep you from stinking (although Axe seems to have been able to define their brand just fine, thanks, even though they're essentially the same product).

So, what is Brand You? If you buy into the whole Fight Club "revolution" of you are not your job, you are not your clothes, you are not your possessions, how do you describe your brand?

Brand Josh is passionate, creative, energetic, hardworking and generally likeable. How do I know? I work hard at being those things. I have a fair bit of self-knowledge because I've worked on it, and I listen to the feedback of people around me.

Which brings me to Chris Brogan's recent post on Gary Vaynerchuk. (Now there's linkbait if I ever saw it: both of them in one sentence?) I've never had a face-to-face conversation with either of these gentlemen, but I think they're both really smart. And I think they're really smart because of what I see of them – the face of their personal brands.

Maybe 10 years ago we didn't think about our personalities as brands, but we most definitely do now. We may have always been selling an image – through our hairstyles, our clothes, our circles of friends, the music we listen(ed) to, the sports we play(ed) – but only in the past few years have we been able to market that image worldwide, and actually been able to make it pay off financially.

So what is Brand You? Are you what you do or what you look like? Are are you how you do? And what of other brands you represent? Can you be the face of a business brand and still have an individual Brand You? (For the record, as a community manager, I believe you can; I may be building a local gym's brand, but I'm definitely Brand Josh both inside and outside the gym's walls and website.)